Archive
The Orthodox community’s response to homosexuality is an increasingly talked about issue A new piece in the conversation is a new video that came out a few days ago. What do you think?
Uproar abounds (again) as Glenn Beck says something sensational and reckless. Everybody and their bubbe are condemning Beck today, with the appropriate amount of moral indignation and outrage. Could it be true?! Is Glenn Beck an … (whispers) anti-Semite? Let’s be clear. Glenn Beck is not a journalist. Glenn Beck is not a professor or […]
What should Jewish students who visit Brussels do? Apparently, they should celebrate Shabbat, tour the city and then get down. [JPost] The kollel stipend protests continue… [JPost] While at Arizona State University, students protest IDF soldiers. [Mondoweiss] And at the University of South Carolina, the administration plans to revise the school’s discrimination policy, which could affect […]
After another busy few days at Pardes I have had time to review the news from the week that has past, and I am pleasantly surprised to note the tone that the prime minister of my country, Stephen Harper, took in his speech to the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism (see Canada’s national paper, […]
Clearly, I like to riff on the wisdom of Raymond Carver in my blog posts–but so what? I like repetition. And repetition is just one of the million things I want to talk about after having just gotten back from the General Assembly (of the Jewish Federations of North America) less than 24 hours ago. […]
It may get the Guinness World Record for “smallest wedding proposal ever:” a computer chip plated in gold. [Forward Shmooze] The University of California cannot censor the anti-Semitic statements of Muslim groups, says the UC’s president. [JJ] The GA hosts a student journalism conference aimed at making said students Israel advocates. A telling quote: “I will […]
In Spirituality House here at Drew University, all forms of the word graduate are considered bad words. We don’t talk about graduating. So the four seniors in the house–myself included–will G-word in May. At Drew, the only non-Jewish head of a school is the dean of the Methodist seminary on campus. Drew has a Jewish […]
With every beginning comes an end. Sound like an introduction to Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities?” Well, not quite. On Oct. 27, I wrote a blog post about the possibility of science eventually disproving religion entirely. Yesterday, scientists came a step closer to proving one of the most highly controversial subjects: The Big […]
Michelle Obama and the first family have a long history of handshake snafus. Most recently, the first lady shook hands with Tifatul Sembiring, a conservative Muslim and Indonesia’s information minister. One would assume that the shaking of hands between dignitaries is a no-brainer. “MObama, meet Mr. Sembiring.” “How do you do?”, as hands reach for […]
Protest movements, to gain legitimacy, often relate their cause to another, more established one from the past. Thus we see that gay rights advocates cite the Civil Rights movement of the fifties and sixties, and advocates against the Iraq War find common cause with antiwar protesters from the Vietnam era. Not all protests are the […]